BRADFORD’S new finance chief has issued a stern warning to Council chiefs that the latest raft of cuts “need to be delivered in their entirety”.

Andrew Crookham said its new three-year savings plan - including cuts to early help for children and care for vulnerable adults - would need to be stuck to.

In 2017/18, Bradford’s budget went so far off track that at one point it had been looking at a £10.5m overspend.

In a report published this week, the assistant director of finance and procurement said in previous years, no more than 15 per cent of planned savings had been reported as off-target, but in 2017/18, this had risen to 51 per cent (£23.5m).

His comments came in the same month that another authority, Northamptonshire County Council, was forced to ban new spending after running out of cash earlier this month.

Mr Crookham said Bradford had been forced to make other cuts and dip into “central contingencies” to balance the books.

He said: “Continued use of one-off resource to mitigate non-delivery of savings in order to balance budgets, which in turn erodes the financial health of an organisation, is clearly bad practice and is the prime reason for the severe financial strain being reported elsewhere in the sector at this time.

“The current savings programme, up to 2020/21, contains sizeable proposals that need to be delivered in their entirety over the remaining three years of the plan, including changes to our Early Help offer, alternative delivery models for our place-based services and most notably demand management in adult social care.”

No official decision has yet been made on proposals to cut hundreds of jobs from the Council’s Early Help team, which oversees children’s centres.